The Second Fall (Or, Chesterton on the Fundamental Flaw in Modern Realism)

I know many good men and women who love Realist literature, and I can in no way blame them. To the Realist, what is real (whether it is good, bad, or ugly), is beautiful because it is true; there is no gloss or artificial layers to it. I understand the logic quite clearly, and agree with it whole-heartedly.
Still, I cannot bring myself to love the Realist tradition quite like I love the Fantasy tradition (note: I differentiate between tradition and genre). I often wondered why. There is a part of me (a spiteful, doubting, nagging part) that claims I am merely a child at heart and that I need to grow up and see the world as it really is. It says I need to put away childish things. However, there is another part of me (an enlarged, more wholesome part that is not really me) that still defiantly claims that my hesitation (and sometimes downright dislike) of Realist literature is not unfounded; on the contrary, its roots run right into the ancient core of another tradition I love, i.e., Christendom. The problem is, I could never quite articulate what it was that caused me to hesitate at the threshold of Realism; I never could say why I held it at a distance, admiring it for what it was but never embracing it as gospel. This inability to explain myself has left myself in a quandary more than once.
It was Oswald Chambers who said that the ones who affected us the most in life are not those who told us something new, but those who gave utterance to that which has been "dumbly struggling" in you for utterance. Well, Chesterton has given me utterance. From his book Heretics, in the chapter titled "On the Negative Spirit," I give my reason for why I, as a Christian writer, cannot fully embrace modern Realism (I emphasize the main point):

"Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which has often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in what Stevenson called...the 'lost fight of virtue.' A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of the law; its only certainty is ill. It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to...
"[It] is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century...The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candor of the moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names...But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good. The thing which it resented, and, as I think, rightly resented, in [modern realism], is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes almost blind with doubt.
"If we compare, let us say, the morality of The Divine Comedy with the morality of Ibsen's Ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the Inferno of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments--Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one--Hell...
"All I venture to point out, with an increased firmness, is that this omission [of an enduring and positive ideal], good or bad, does leave us face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no definite images of good. To us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which we cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us."

The problem with the modern mind (and a character in Pan's Labyrinth demonstrates this well) is that it thinks fantasy is merely "childish" or "blind" or "immature" because it only sees the good and ignores evil. That is an utter lie. If there is no evil in a story, no antagonist or antagonism beset against the hero(es), then there is no story. To borrow words from Dr. W, modern Realism has a whole lot of tension, but no resolution other than the realization that all is not well. Christians firmly hold that, in the real world, evil is a fact, and the good guys do not always win. However, Christians also hold that, in the real world, the Good does win in the end. In the realist fantasy (like the LOTR), it is indeed a long, dark road to get there, but we will get there.
Further comments about Christianity's stance on good and evil in regards to reality can be found in this other blog entry of mine.